Appalachian Summer - Softcover

Bonta, Marcia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822956934 ISBN 13: 9780822956938

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999

Synopsis

Bonta offers a day-by-day account of the natural life of one place--her 648-acre property in south central Pennsylvania. In her minute observations of one place, one season, Marcia Bonta lays bare the connections we retain to the natural world, which is, finally, our own.

About this title

About the Author:

Marcia Bonta is a freelance nature writer and the author of, in addition to her Appalachian seasons books, Outbound Journeys in Pennsylvania, More Outbound Journeys in Pennsylvania, Women in the Field, American Women Afield  (editor), and Escape to the Mountain. She has written more than three hundred magazine articles for such publications as Birder's World, Bird Watcher's Digest, Living Bird, and Hawk Mountain News. She writes “Pennsylvania Outbound Journeys for the Family” for Pennsylvania Wildlife and "The Naturalist's Eye" for Pennsylvania Game News.

From Kirkus Reviews:

paper 0-8229-5693-4 A middle-of-the-road nature diary, set in the Pennsylvania mountains. Following her Appalachian Spring (1991), Bonta records, in the form of a diary polished into little essays, the summertime natural history of her small corner of central Pennsylvania, a mountainside place that is neither remote nor hard to get to; yet, she notes wryly, to most easterners, raised on roads paved to everywhere and used to convenience at all costs, our home is daunting to reach by vehicle and impossible on foot. Thus effectively isolated, even though interstate highways and new housing developments ever encroach, she reflects on the ways of woodchucks, foxes, woodpeckers, pewees, phoebes, wood buffaloes, squirrels, gray shrews, and mushrooms. Along the way she discusses the hows and whys of nature observation, noting the pleasures and occasional frustrations of fieldwork. But, regrettably, Bonta far too easily falls into nature-good, humans-bad sentimentalizing, as when she coyly writes of discovering a nest full of newborn brown and yellow grouse chicks who crawl all over her, peeping in the confusion of a mother-bond imprinting gone awry: I will tell the story over and over, like a mantra, to myself and others. The experience will remain as a shining talisman to illuminate the inevitable dark days of life. To have been mistaken for a ruffed grouse mother is a privilege few humans have experienced. And her prose lacks the poetic grandeur necessary to sing a place into imaginative being, as Annie Dillard has done for rural Virginia and Ann Zwinger for rural Coloradoa shame, inasmuch as the place about which Bonta writes seems so inviting. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0822956934
• ISBN 13: 9780822956938
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232